Daniel and I did not know what to expect. Michael maintains various personas—artist, curator, writer, educator, organizer—and even more sub-personas within his art practice. In recent years, he has drifted toward observations of patterns and oddities in everyday language, but had previously built his practice around the theme of urban memory, particularly through the use of architectural models and diagrams.
Eventually, Michael’s “bad imitation” was text-based after all: a tongue-in-cheek series called Not Artistic Advice (2022), which isolated and reproduced pieces of advice he had received over his two-decade-long career in the arts. But in the context of this interview, which attempts to touch upon multiple aspects of Michael’s diverse practice, it is one of the initial works he proposed for our exhibition that springs to mind. How Aren’t Things (2007) comprises three artfully cropped photographs of urban sites, with each image titled after a Singaporean artist whose works they unintentionally resemble. This work intrigues me because, eleven years later, Michael would create a work titled How Are Things (2018), a large-scale installation that greeted public transit commuters with the eponymous phrase.
How Aren’t Things and How Are Things are not meant to be companion pieces. Yet to me, they represent an indirect exchange between two of Michael’s interests—the imaginative possibilities of architectural environments, and the surprising enigmas of even the most colloquial language. I see this in how the former reframes architectural elements simply by the use of a title, and how the latter is a greeting made not-so-casual when blown up and installed on the tiered grandstand of a sports complex.
This is what happens, perhaps subconsciously, for multi-hyphenates: their interests inevitably accrue, overlap, and intertwine. In the following conversation, Michael and I attempt to tease out what we can of these entanglements, even if one interview can never be sufficient to cover a practice such as his.
—Berny Tan
The use of text as a standalone element has become increasingly prominent in the last few years of your practice, particularly as a means to reveal the idiosyncrasies of everyday communication. How Are Things is one example, while Friendly Strangers Party (2019) distilled fleeting encounters into simple statements printed on pennant flags. What compels you to investigate such forms of language, as both subject and medium?
My interest in language lies in its power and limits. That words can influence thought, emotion, and action allows politicians and copywriters alike to keep their jobs. In everyday communication, linguistic abilities—especially articulateness, code-switching, multilingualism, and subtlety—convey confidence, sophistication, and thoughtfulness. As a result, people are often judged based on their tone, pronunciation, and word choices rather than on their reasoning or the context of their speech. My specific focus within language often touches upon two underlying themes: first, how these interpretations of speech reflect class inequality, and second, how everyday communication is interwoven with the mental state of both speaker and audience. Perhaps this is because my family’s financial situation and emotional state have both been quite turbulent over the years.
As far back as I can remember, inarticulateness structures my everyday existence. Much as I freeze while finding the right response to greetings, I am also unwilling to partake in expected decorum at authenticity’s expense. Some of my works explore this uneasy space: How Are Things was a large-scale anamorphic text installation at the grandstand of Woodlands Stadium, addressing commuters traveling between two nearby MRT (mass rapid transit) stations. This was my attempt at reflecting on how such a greeting could be experienced in a wide range of ways, from friendly to distressing. For Ice-Breaking Attempt No. 1 (2018), I had letters made from reinforced steel bars stacked neatly on the floor, until the otherwise static work was activated by the question, “How have you been?,” posed by an unknowing friend/visitor to me. Upon hearing this question, I would respond by asking “Can I answer you in a minute?” and proceed to pick up those metal letters and have them fall to the floor in a cacophony. The fact that the letters could make up the word “EXHAUSTING” was secondary to the Sisyphean act of picking up and letting go of the textual components.
All my text-based artworks involve creating a framework that I think of as “game rules,” where the verbal (words and phrases that I have collected or created) and the nonverbal (the materials used, the visual appearance, the exhibition site) intersect. Holographic stickers that formed the words How Are Things allowed the changing light conditions near the site to affect their legibility, visual quality, and significance. For Friendly Strangers Party, paper pennant flags were printed with an inventory of words or deeds (e.g. “ask,” “remind him,” “go for supper”) of people I have met in my life. The use of paper signals the casual contexts of these words, yet each textual account reads like a campaign’s call to action, indicating the potentially enduring effects of even one-off encounters.
Your interest in everyday language has also taken on more specificity, manifesting in works that explore the social dynamics of the art world. I can’t, I have to go to Mongolia (2020) invited people to share their best excuse for not turning up to an exhibition opening, which was then written in colored chalk on the walls of the exhibition space. How was this work developed?
My experience of art exhibitions has largely been unsatisfying. I don’t mean that most art showcases are poorly conceived and executed. I mean I find the social protocols to be stress-inducing and disappointing. As a participating artist, I find myself, after having made and installed the work, now tired and nervous, explaining it to curious (and judgmental) viewers. As an exhibition visitor, especially at openings, I find myself functioning more as a body count than an individual who matters. So you can say, while addressing my own exhibition frustration and fatigue, I’ve been wondering what a good exhibition experience looks like.
When I received curator Wang Ruo Bing’s invitation to do a solo show at Comma Space, I was initially hesitant; I was mentally cooking up an excuse not to do it. Then it dawned on me that I may not be alone in feeling that way, so I decided to conceive of a participatory project that my contributors could join without doing much.
I can’t, I have to go to Mongolia saw excuses as a site of struggle and creativity. It aimed to reclaim excuse from the realm of invalidity, irresponsibility, or regret, to being a symptom of and resistance against social expectations. This came in two parts. The first was an open call for contributions of excuses for not being able to show up at my opening. Over one hundred of these were handwritten onto the gallery walls, with the contributors credited as a collective. Many of the excuses were reasonable (e.g., “I got lessons”), while others were hilarious (e.g., “I don’t have the right underwear”), and a few were heartwrenching (e.g., “pasal adik saya masuk penjara,” Malay for “because my brother went to jail”).
The walls of excuses then served as the environment for the second part, which was the opening program of eighteen invited performances. Sarah Lin improvised three unplugged songlets inspired by excuses chosen by the audiences, while Zou Zhao explained her unpunctuality that evening through her operatic laments. To end it all on a nice note, I gave out mystery prizes to my favorite excuses and performances. This project, with its serious intent, light humor, and low stakes, was a jibe at the myth of the contemporary artist as maker-marketer.
A successor of sorts to the previous work, Not Artistic Advice, spotlighted various tips, opinions, and comments that you have received during your two-decade-long art career. These pieces of advice were, however, only a small selection of a larger collection. Half a year on, what are your reflections on this series, and possible continuations or expansions?
I was humbled by the positive response to the work, which featured these pieces of advice on various “background formats”—including navigational signs and badges—that appeared to be extraneous elements in the exhibition, yet remained a constant presence that could not be ignored. The most popular badge, Do a bit, likely resonated with the current rethinking of relentless pursuit of success and excellence, while the instructions Go Away and Protect Yourself, divorced from their original contexts, suddenly took on new absurd meanings when applied to the back of safety vests worn by the gallery sitters.
I did make, however, a few surprising observations. One, a number of specific pieces had duplex functions: the badge, You’re referencing too much, touched many junior designers who have been told that one too many times, while the same allegation was worn proudly by the artist-scholar type to mock their peers and students afflicted with such a crippling condition. Two, the light box signage that bore the claim A soldout show is better / than making a lot of money led to some intense online discussions about money talk in the arts. Three, the development of thirteen pieces via various background formats obliquely brought back “architecture” to my practice; whereas it was a subject of investigation and imagination in my past work, here, architectural space hosted my pieces, which pretended to support navigation for the visitors.
As for continuation, I believe Supernua (2022), a bean bag which I reframed as a participatory sculpture to provide a place of rest within an exhibition, was a continued exploration of social decorum in the art scene. As for expansions, let’s say that these unused words of caution from my Not Artistic Advice archive—“If you do it, you will also get canceled”—might be brewing a sister series that explores social landmines in Singapore’s art scene.
Another text-based exploration of the art world is Objects of Convenience (2021). Moving away from verbal or written communication, this work is a series of panels that narrate the fates of various public sculptures in Singapore, without identifying them by title or artist. Despite, or perhaps because of, their matter-of-fact tone, they come across as both poignant and humorous. Could you talk about your motivations for this work, and the process of creating it?
Public sculptures often get into the news after they have been vandalized. The usual narrative is binaristic: perpetrator-vandals on the one side, and art/artist-victims on the other. Taking a non-judgmental approach, I was interested in what these sculptures actually went through; that is, what was the precise sequence of actions on and predicaments of these three-dimensional artworks in public space?
In researching this work, I filled a spreadsheet with over seventy news reports, social media comments, and anecdotes on public sculpture in Singapore. Of these, I selected twenty-four cases, which were chosen to represent range, recurrences, and anomalies. I then wrote out each of these cases by describing the acts and situations sequentially, the result of which looked like “small poems” to me. For example:
MOVED
FROM THE FRONT
TO THE SIDE
OF THE BUILDING,
MISSING
These were fabricated as a gray stencil, a format that coheres with the theme of “convenience” that I observed across the cases—whether the sculptures were changed or shifted for the sake of convenience, or were more easily damaged because of their convenient locations, and so on. Finally, I chose twenty pieces to be placed casually on L-hooks on the gallery wall in alphabetical order.
Until we fully acknowledge that it is human nature to seek out convenience, for better or worse, we will continue to be hypocritical about it: enjoying convenience while bemoaning its effects as a sign of menace, ugliness, and disrespect. This acknowledgement doesn’t let problematic policies and practices off the hook, but hopefully serves as a common basis for discussing better principles and methods of presenting public art in Singapore.
You recently revisited Creatif Compleks (2018/22), which takes the form of a diagram about a hypothetical property development consisting of various configurations of the artist’s home and studio. How does this work relate to your broader interest in the sustainability of creative independence?
As its title hints, the work was an attempt to represent a pattern of emotions, memories, perceptions, and wishes in the unconscious mind, organized around the theme of creativity. The work is a speculative real estate launch advertisement announcing the property’s key features, which were variedly utopian (e.g., “refugees welcome,” “made with pre-anthropocene matters”); realistic (ready in “2038,” not the near future); aspirational or too entitled, depending on how one sees them (“24-hr tech support”); or confounding (“cryocache,” where artists might store their eggs or sperm; “amphi-kitchen,” of whose function and form I have no concrete idea). The use of LED neon lights for the work further served as a commentary on the feverish development and promotion of contemporary art in Singapore.
To be honest, I have changed my mind on some of the entries on this diagram, but the myriad registers—from sincere to hilarious—make the work timeless and dated at the same time. Due to high living costs, most artists in Singapore can’t feed themselves solely on their art practice, so “sustainability” and “creative independence” are rare bedmates here. That is the context to which this work is responding.
Having said that, some arts practitioners try to support one another through ground-up initiatives and peer activism. My contribution in this regard includes starting the Facebook group Money Lobangs for Part-Time Educators and Other Creative Independents in 2018. This resource-sharing platform also invites full-timers to contribute, as I believe that we need to think of the Singapore art scene as an ecology. Importantly, recognizing our own creative complexes allows us to know what pushes and impedes us as individuals and as a scene.
The use of architectural models and floor plans, depicting both real and fictitious places, was a hallmark of your earlier artistic practice navigating themes of urban memory, such as in National Columbarium of Singapore (2009). It has been some time since your last new work that employed this strategy (2019’s Lines, Planes, Volumes, which presented models of three contemporary art institutions in Southeast Asia). What role does architecture play in your practice today, and what relationship, if any, does it have with your exploration of language?
A big part of what I do is observing. This means looking around for as long as possible until action is inevitable. It also means picking out patterns and oddities, the underlying and the obscure. Initially, my aim for surveying art and other cultural practices such as architecture was research, in order to develop a personal style. This was how the discipline of architecture—and its means of communication including models and drawings—became both my subject and medium.
For some time, “urban memory and fiction” has been a useful phrase in my bio. Here, the language I used was especially critical when I mixed historical and fictional data, starting with National Columbarium of Singapore, which contained models and texts of both actual and imaginary buildings of Singapore’s past. In this previous phase of my practice where architecture was my subject and contextual reference, I also developed textual elements to explore a variety of subthemes, such as art-architecture heritage (The $10,000 Gallery of Art, 2007), and speculative architecture (Second-Hand City, 2010–11), which were realized as book sculptures and architectural poster prints respectively. I eventually explored presentations of text that were not specific to architecture: a pure-text mute video (Gone Solo, 2013), a phrase fabricated in glass neon (Machine for Living Dying In, 2014), and mind maps rendered in LED-lit perspex sheets (Bibliotopia, 2015).
My current relationship with architecture and language reflects a recent awareness of my own financial and health situation. Even though you didn’t explicitly ask, allow me to share the reasons behind my slowing down of model-making, floor plan painting, or architectural poster design. One, age is catching up and my eyesight is not like before, so labor-intensive and detailed work has become more challenging. Two, I realized over time that space was a luxury I couldn’t afford, so I’ve been downsizing my working space—from a seventy-two-square-meter unit in 2011 to a thirty-six-square-meter one in 2014; to my spare bedroom in my flat in 2016; and since 2019, to my current half of my shared bedroom table. I may reclaim that spare room as my studio in time to come, but for now, you could say I have been slowly recognizing the “unsustainability” of my creative independence, and progressively taking remedial measures.
This downsizing of workspace required a change in artistic method and ambition, all based in a mindset shift: from primarily making large-scale physical art objects, I now do smaller things, facilitate workshops, respond to invitations for commissioned projects, and create temporary works in public space (with low to no storage implications). From aspiring toward international art platforms, which impinged drastically on my physical and mental health, I now just do what I can handle and find meaningful. The connection between architecture and language in this new context has correspondingly changed. Architecture now provides the site, context, and analogy in my current interest in the mood of the art world. For instance, I wonder about power structures, professional ceilings, human fixtures, and back doors to global art.
One of your major projects over the past year was Workshopables (co-developed with media artist Ong Kian Peng), an experimental platform of art workshops that addresses “the taught, the untaught, and the unteachable in the mainstream education system.” Before this, you had also conceptualized a number of other workshops, including A Library of Splendid Hacks (2021, in collaboration with Loh Xiang Yun), a project geared toward seniors, which explored life hacks through bookmaking and printmaking. What is it about this pedagogical format that fascinates you?
I lecture part-time at various art schools in Singapore, mostly art theory and writing modules, and occasionally art studio modules. Though I’m competent in it, and at times receive good feedback, I actually don’t like teaching as much as I like learning. You could say teaching is my excuse to learn, or maybe, the school is a safe space to experiment with ideas and processes. However, teaching is draining and very performative, not to mention the preparatory and administrative work. So I’ve been wondering how to improve my relationship with pedagogy.
To be honest, I did initially get into community arts projects with seniors due to the relative ease of securing funding for such programs in Singapore. But I learnt a lot from the process, not just from the participants but also from the process of preparing to engage them; designing and facilitating art workshops with seniors actually changed the way I lecture on diploma and degree art modules!
Workshopables was an alignment of stars: a particularly open-ended grant, funded by the Singapore government to support freelancers in the arts during the COVID-19 pandemic, inspired my proposed experimental project for artist-participants to teach and learn something from one another; my observation of the hyper-professionalization of artists, best represented by the fresh art graduate nimble in navigating production, marketing, access, reception, and, in some cases, accompanied by an assistant or two; and my desire to get paid for what I’ve been doing pro bono for some time, such as organizing Got Room, Do Things (2018), a series of life-skill workshops and talks.
My collaborator and I had enough areas of overlap and difference in our respective practices to spark our development of workshops that address the margins of education. We asked ourselves a few questions: What has been excluded in mainstream education? What needs re-teaching or unlearning? What does it mean to be workshopable (teachable)? What opportunities might arise in teaching what one doesn’t know? What can we do with learners other than teach them something useful? How does one learn? I believe you can sense my admiration of a number of thinkers and artists in regards to pedagogy: Paulo Friere, Jacques Rancière, Annette Krauss, Motoyuki Shitamichi, among others.
Besides being an artist and an educator, you are also active as a curator. Back in 2015, you curated a group exhibition called what it is about when it is about nothing (Mizuma Gallery, Singapore), which you have described as the “one project that represents [you] holistically.” Why is this so, and more generally, what do you aim to accomplish with your curatorial practice?
I don't have an overarching philosophy of curating. My main goal while curating any project is to survive it. Curators have to navigate the multiple roles of idea generator, organizer, fundraiser, writer, project manager, publicist, gallery sitter, to name a handful. Sometimes I think of curating as a cultural form of masochism, disguising self-punishment as contextualization and platforming work.
My changing aim in curating over the years went like this: in 2001, I wanted the staff show I was co-curating with my bosses at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in Singapore to look presentable. In 2007, I left Singapore for Hong Kong, and I discovered that curating and opening my studio to exhibition programs made me new friends in a strange territory. In 2015, having experienced and been humbled by the Berlin (and broader European) art scene, I wanted to curate in a more instinctive way. When I was approached by Mizuma Gallery, I was encouraged by the open yet specific brief (“Could you curate a show of works by artists from or living in Singapore?”) and good working conditions (enough lead time and a reasonable honorarium). Instead of starting with a theme, I closed my eyes and asked myself which recently seen artworks I would like to see again—not necessarily because I liked them but perhaps because I felt they could spark a conversation. One work led to another, and before I knew it, I had a group show by free association.
The exhibition sought to explore the aesthetics of “nothing” in the context of an art scene anxious to assign something meaningful to artworks, and to expand definitions of the “Singaporean artist” beyond country of birth, nationality, and base. The themes of “nothingness” and “nuance”—as a counterpoint to the jovial mood that was characteristic of that year’s celebrations of Singapore’s fiftieth anniversary of independence—surfaced from the chosen artworks, not the other way round.
I called this exhibition a “holistic” representation of me because I felt I had found my voice, or a way to articulate my various voices. I also discovered how I had been relating my curatorial and studio practices all along: I curate what I wish I had made. This description states not just the subject of my curatorial fascination, which is what I’m unable to do myself artistically and therefore a recognition of personal limits, but also highlights the importance of differentiating artistic and curatorial “intellectual properties.”
Today, I try to curate without doing much more than filling gaps, or leaving some gaps unfilled where they need to be. The restlessness and fickle-mindedness in my curating, and overall practice in art, have me picking up new skills and knowledge all the time. This precarious way of life often leaves me alternating between feeling anxious about being outed as an impostor, and relieved for having noted something interesting through the work that I do. It’s the paradox of having a generalist practice: my diverse and changing methods give me access to different realities, which is eye-opening and paralyzing at the same time. What keeps me relatively sane is a self-reminder that it doesn’t really matter—which could well be “what it is about when it is about nothing.”
